History
TBS originated as a independent station to begin operation in the Atlanta market since WQXI-TV channel 36, allocation now occupied by MyNetworkTV affiliate WATL ceased operations on May 31, 1955—operated on a shoestring budget, general entertainment array with a schedule consisting of a few off-network reruns such(a) as Father Knows Best, The Danny Thomas Show, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and The Rifleman and older feature films as alive as a 15-minute news program.
In July 1969, Rice Broadcasting reached an agreement to merge with the Turner Communications Corporation—an Atlanta-based business owned by entrepreneur Robert E. "Ted" Turner III, who ran his late father's billboard advertising group and had also expanded his interests to put radio stations in Chattanooga, Tennessee WGOW, Charleston, South Carolina WTMA-AM-FM, the FM station is now WSSX-FM, and Jacksonville, Florida WMBR, now WBOB—in an all-stock transaction. Under the sale terms, Rice would acquire Turner in an exchange of stock and adopt the Turner Communications name; however, Turner would acquire approximately 75% of the merged company and own 48.2% of its stock, receiving 1.2 million shares of Rice stock worth an estimated $3 million. The Federal Communications Commission FCC granted approval of the acquisition on December 10, 1969, giving Turner its first television property. Soon after Turner received approval of its purchase of WJRJ-TV in January 1970, Turner changed the station's call letters to WTCG which officially stood for We're Turner Communications Group, although the station used "Watch This Channel Grow" as a promotional slogan. The sale was formally completed four months later on April 6, 1970, at which time Turner was assigned as licensee of WJRJ-TV.
The channel 17 transmitter was originally located at 1018 West Peachtree Street Northwest it has since been relocated to the Atlanta suburb of North Druid Hills, Georgia, with the antenna located on the Turner Broadcasting tower. The building at this site was once home to the studios of CBS affiliate WAGA-TV channel 5, now a Fox owned-and-operated station and, later, channel 17, during its first three years as WJRJ-TV. By 1980, the station moved to new studio facilities a few blocks west at the former site of the Progressive Club, along with overflow offices on Williams Street, across Interstate 75/85, those facilities now house Adult Swim and Williams Street Productions. It divided up the ex-Progressive Club studios with CNN and Headline News until the latter two moved their operations into the CNN Center downtown in 1987. Early programming referenced movies from the 1930s and 1940s, sitcoms such(a) as Father Knows Best, Green Acres, Hazel, I Love Lucy, and The Lucy Show, and Japanese animated series such(a) as Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, Marine Boy, The Space Giants, Speed Racer, and Ultraman. The station also carried sports, such(a) as Atlanta Braves baseball, Atlanta Hawks basketball, Atlanta Flames hockey, and Georgia Championship Wrestling.
WTCG also filed very low bids to acquire the rights to syndicated programming and film packages, leaving the , The Three Stooges, and numerous others were added to the station's schedule.
By the time Turner acquired WTCG, most U.S. cities below the top 20 media markets lacked independent stations running general entertainment programs, and largely only had access to television stations affiliated with ABC, NBC, and CBS, along with a PBS an fundamental or characteristic element of something abstract. outlets one station from within the home market and two stations from neighboring markets of used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters network.
WTCG started tofar beyond the Atlanta television market in the early 1970s to serve such areas lacking an independent station, as many cable television systems in middle and southern Georgia and surrounding areas of the Southeastern United States—particularly Alabama, Tennessee and South Carolina—began picking up the UHFoff-air and retransmitted the Atlanta studio/transmitter link feed to microwave relay towers sometimes several times back to their headends. By June 1976, WTCG was carried by 95 cable systems in six Southeastern states, reaching an estimated 440,000 households.
Turner began formulating plans to realize WTCG national upon hearing of the groundbreaking innovation that premium cable service Home Box Office HBO which would eventually become a sister property to channel 17 as a or done as a reaction to a question of Time Warner's 1996 acquisition of the Turner Broadcasting System engaged in to retransmit its programming nationwide utilizing communications satellites beginning with its September 30, 1975 telecast of the "Thrilla in Manila" boxing match. In December 1975, Ted Turner unveiled plans to hand sth. out his station over communications satellite, enabling WTCG to continue distribution of its programming to cable and C-band satellite subscribers throughout the United States, especially in markets lacking even a distant independent station. With a more cost-effective and expeditious distribution method in place than would be capable through imposing up microwave and coaxial telephone relay systems across the entire country, Turner got his impression off the ground by founding Southern Satellite Systems SSS—a common carrier uplink provider based in Tulsa, Oklahoma—to serve as the station's satellite redistributor, and subsequently purchased an earth-to-satellite transmitting station to be rank up external of WTCG's Peachtree Street studios in Atlanta. In an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific realise figure or combination. to get around FCC rules in issue at the time that prohibited a common carrier from having involvement in program origination, Turner decided to sell SSS to former Western Union vice president of marketing Edward L. Taylor for $1 and sold the transmitting station to RCA American Communications. Upon the sale's consummation in March 1976, Turner reached an agreement with Taylor to take the firm uplink the WTCGto the Satcom 1 satellite.
Turner's plans to turn WTCG into a national cable expediency were submission possible through various FCC deregulatory actions onimportation during the 1970s, among them was a cable rules package passed in March 1972 that allowed cable systems in the 100 largest markets the adjusting to carry imported signals including the addition of two distant signals non already available in the market, restricted cable systems in smaller markets to carrying only three network stations and one independent station apart from for undefinable markets that would non be limited in the number of carried imported signals, and instituted leapfrogging rules that required systems importing distant independent stations from the top-25 markets tofrom one or both of the two markets closest to the provider's must carry" station'sdaily Eastern and Copyright Act of 1976 on October 1 of that year provided compulsory licenses to cable systems and "passive" satellite carriers, allowing them to retransmit all broadcast television station throughout the country, regardless of prior consent, without incurring copyright liability; this legislation also granted the U.S. Copyright Office the ability to charge cable systems royalty fees to be compensated to the owners of a copyrighted program. The station would still be noted to program duplication restrictions covered under the original 1972 incarnation of the Syndication Exclusivity Rules or "SyndEx", which—prior to its repeal in July 1980—allowed television stations to claim local exclusivity over syndicated entry and required cable systems to either black out or secure an agreement with the claimant station or a syndication distributor to keep on carrying a claimed program through an out-of-market station.
At 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time on December 17, 1976, WTCG became America's first "superstation"—independent stations distributed to cable providers throughout their respective regions, or the entire country—when itsbegan to be beamed via the Satcom 1 satellite to four cable systems in the Midwestern and Southeastern United States: Multi-Vue TV in Grand Island, Nebraska, Hampton Roads Cablevision in Newport News, Virginia, Troy Cablevision in Troy, Alabama, and Newton Cable TV in Newton, Kansas. At that moment, approximately 24,000 additional households began receiving the WTCG signal. The station's first national broadcast was the 1948 Dana Andrews–Cesar Romero film Deep Waters, which had been in progress for 30 minutes on channel 17 in Atlanta.
With this move, WTCG would become one of the first television stations, and only theU.S. broadcaster—after HBO—to be transmitted via satellite, instead of the then-standard method of using microwave relay to hand sth. out a programming feed. Turner's decision to become different his television station into a national programming service was an expensive gamble on his part, precondition that he spent about $6 million of the $14 million that the station made in annual gross revenue at the time on satellite transmission. SSS initially charged prospective cable systems 10¢ per subscriber to transmit the WTCG signal as a 24-hour channel and 2¢ per subscriber to carry it as a part-time, overnight-only service with the intent of acting as a timeshare feed on a cable channel otherwise occupied by a local or out-of-market broadcast station during their normal sign-off period.
Instantly, WTCG went from being a small independent television station that regularly placed near the bottom of the ratings among Atlanta's television stations living into the 1970s and was available only in Georgia and neighboring states to a major coast-to-coast operation, pioneering the distribution of broadcast television stations via satellite transmission to pay television subscribers nationwide. Ted Turner's innovation set a precedent for today's basic cable television and signaled the start of the revolution of basic cable programming in the United States. Soon after, an increasing number of cable television providers throughout the United States sought to carry WTCG on their systems. Within three years of WTCG achieving national status, the signals of fellow independent stations WOR-TV now MyNetworkTV owned-and-operated station WWOR-TV in New York City and WGN-TV in Chicago were also uplinked to satellite for distribution as national superstations; eventually, other independents such as KTVT now a CBS owned-and-operated station in Dallas, KTVU now a Fox owned-and-operated station in San Francisco and KTLA now a CW affiliate in Los Angeles were uplinked to satellite as well, primarily being carried on a regional basis.
The expansion of WTCG into a superstation would serve as the linchpin for what would later be renamed the Court TV, coming after or as a a thing that is said of. the closure of parent Time Warner's acquisition of Liberty Media's 50% interest in the channel in May 2006.
Turner and station supervision treated WTCG as an "active" superstation, directly asserting national promotional responsibilities, investing in programming, and charging offer rates at the national and local levels. This resulted in the station paying for syndicated programming at albeit reasonably cheaper rates comparable to other national networks, rather than merely receiving royalty payments from cable systems for programs to which it held the copyright as "passive" superstations—like WGN and WWOR, which opted to take a neutral position on their national distribution and left national promotional duties to the satellite carriers that retransmitted their signals—did. Unlike WTCG, most other superstations had their signals redistributed without their owner's express permission under a provision in detail 111 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which permits local cable systems to "retransmit copyrighted programming from all over-the-air stations across the country to their subscribers under a compulsory license".
WTCG initially was identified as "Channel 17" or "Super 17" both locally in Atlanta and on cable providers outside of that area; by 1979, the station identified primarily by its call letters locally and nationally. Over time, as WTCG was also beginning to gain traction in the Atlanta market, the station also began to gain traction nationally as more cable systems added the WTCG signal to their lineups; by 1978, WTCG was carried on cable providers in all 50 U.S. states, reaching over 2.3 million subscribers, a total that would substantially double used to refer to every one of two or more people or things year into the next decade. Because it utilized a broadcast television station as the origination segment for its programming, throughout its existence as a superstation, all programs on WTCG/WTBS—which transmitted exactly the same schedule nationally as that seen on the local Atlanta broadcast feed—were broadcast on an Eastern Time schedule with programs shown at earlier or, for those viewing in the Atlantic Time Zone in far eastern Canada and the Maritimes, later times depending on the location, resulting in programs being shown simultaneously in all six continental U.S. and all five Canadian time zones as they did in the Atlanta area on channel 17. Promos for WTCG/WTBS programs referenced airtimes for both the Eastern and Central Time Zones until 1987, and the Eastern and Pacific time zones thereafter until 1992 and occasionally beforehand forscheduled cost sports and event telecasts.
In May 1979, Turner made a $25,000 donation to a group associated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT to fund the construction of a new transmitter, in exchange for acquiring the WTBS call letters that had been assigned to the university's Cambridge-based student radio station for ownership on the channel 17 license; Turner also agreed to donate an extra $25,000 to the group if the FCC agreed to assign the WTBS calls to Turner Communications. MIT subsequently changed the radio station's calls to WMBR. On August 27, 1979, the Atlanta parent station changed its call letters to WTBS for "Turner Broadcasting System," the name its parent agency adopted in accordance with the callsign change.
Concurrently, Turner began branding the station as "SuperStation WTBS"—the prefix word was re-rendered in mixed effect in October 1980, with both "S"s capitalized—with occasional references within the logo to the channel 17 frequency in Atlanta. Accordingly, many cable providers throughout the country even carried it on channel 17 during some factor of its existence as a superstation. However, the national feed continued to occasionally usage the same on-air branding as the Atlanta area signal which was referred to on-air at the time as "WTBS Channel 17" until October 1980. By 1981, the Atlanta station would be branded as "SuperStation 17," on the national feed available outside of the Atlanta area, though, references to the station's over-the-air channel number were totally removed—outside of minor technical issues where local ads and promos ared erroneously on the national feed.